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Tony was born in Mayobridge, County Down, in Northern Ireland. He emigrated to Canada in 1962, and worked all over British Columbia in the construction industry as a welder. He said his intention was to earn a fortune and return to Ireland to buy a farm. All that changed in 1968 when he met Gwen who was a psychiatric nurse by profession and they married in 1971. On March 26, the couple celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary. New West Gypsum now has 80 employees world-wide and runs a trucking fleet of 16 trucks here in British Columbia. Since they operate in Canada, the United States and Britain, they work in dollars, pounds and euros and Tony said, “we are fortunate to have a great office staff that manages all our business out of our Langley office.” The company started in 1985 as a salvage company but all of that changed after new rules banned gypsum from being dumped in the ocean or the landfill. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, so it was for the McCamleys. “Recycling is very political,” Tony said, “it depends where you are, a lot of people don’t want to take responsibility for their waste and that includes a lot of big manufacturers. So, you can run into conflict with the manufacturers, governments and everyone else...it takes years to get them all on the same page. “When we started out, we were told it couldn’t be done and we spent years and years and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to prove that it could be done, to the point that we nearly went bankrupt. Now, we’re looked upon as heroes, but if we hadn’t believed in ourselves and what we were doing, and didn’t have the determination to see it through, we would have been bankrupt by now.” Speaking about the difficulty of selling the idea of recycling to companies, governments and individuals, Tony said, “one of the hardest things in the world is to manage change and that’s what we’ve done. W’ve taken a concept that people said couldn’t be done and turned it into a business.”
It began when New West Gypsum went from being a salvage company to a recycling company, Tony said, “when we had the salvage company, we used an incinerator to burn all the wood and other refuse. “But you can’t burn gypsum, so for our first couple of years in business, we had a permit to dump the gypsum in the ocean or the landfill. Then the government banned this practice. About the same time, a large company approached us about coming up with an alternative and finding a way to recycle the gypsum.” New West Gypsum lost no time in designing and building their own recycling machine, and then they patented the process. “It took a matter of months after some trials and re-adjustment of equipment,” said Tony. “In 1987, when we built the first machine, the cost for equipment and labour was approximately, $350,000-400,000. Today, the same machine, with the cost of labor and equipment, is about $750,000 dollars. “To our knowledge we are unique, in that we have the only machine in the world that can recycle waste, even if it is wet, and at the production rate that we can. Last year alone in Vancouver we processed over 90,000 tons of waste. “Because gypsum is fire rated, you have to take the paper out of it, so that it can be reused again...we found a way to do that by separating the core from the paper, so that the core could be recycled.” When the McCamleys’ first started the recycling process, they were left with large quantities of paper that had to be disposed of and sent to the dump. The government was so impressed with the great job that they had done with recycling gypsum, they asked if New West Gypsum could come up with another way to recycle the huge amounts of paper that were going to the landfill. Once again, Tony and Gwen had to call on their design and creative abilities. As Gwen said, “we then designed a pulper and now the majority of our paper is pulped and sent back to make new cardboard. This is turned into pizza boxes, beer cases, liner paper ...anything that is brown.”
New West Gypsum has branched out and their unique equipment has been marketed internationally. The machines are all built in Langley at the New West Gypsum shop and shipped overseas by container. “Our son Michael has just returned from England”, said Tony,“ where he trained staff on the operation of our recycling machines and he will also be going to France to train staff there. My brother-in-law, runs our U.K. operation, my nephew runs the Toronto operation and another nephew runs the plant in New Westminster...so, there’s a lot of McCamleys around!” The expansion of New West Gypsum to the various points in Canada, the United States and overseas has resulted in a lot of traveling for Tony and Gwen to speak with manufacturers and governments about their waste and how to recycle it. Despite their busy schedules, both Tony and Gwen are very supportive of all things Celtic, and along with all his other commitments, Tony McCamley is the new president of the Celtic Heritage Society of Canada while Gwen is the treasurer. Along with other members of the committee, they are working hard to bring the concept of a Celtic Cultural Centre to fruitation in Burnaby. This is a huge job which requires a lot of help and support from the Celtic community. * For more information about New West Gypsum Recycling, call (604) 534-9925, or e-mail: info@nwgypsum.com. Visit their website at: www.nwgypsum.com. [For more information about the Celtic Heritage Society of Canada and the proposed Celtic Cultural Centre call George McDonnell at (604) 270-2881.]
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